Medium access control for wireless extensions of ATM networks

Wireless access to broadband communication networks is becoming an important issue. This paper discusses medium access aspects for a wireless extension of high-speed asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. A centralized control scheme for a coordinated medium access is required in order to efficiently accommodate ATM traffic on wireless links. It turns out that the scheduler algorithm needed for the coordinated access strongly influences the cell delay which is most important for delay sensitive services. The performance of a first-come first-serve scheduler in terms of cell delay is analyzed for video-phone services. By modelling the cell stream of each terminal with an independent Bernoulli process the average queue length and cell delay can be evaluated in terms of the burstiness of the sources.